Embodied, Participatory Sense-Making in Digitally-Augmented Music Practices: Theoretical Principles and the Artistic Case “SoundBikes”

Abstract

Electronic and digital technologies open immense opportunities for music composition, listening, interaction, and participation. However, at the same time, they critically challenge some of the most basic principles that drive human engagement and interaction with music. This article first presents a theoretical discussion of two of these principles, namely sensorimotor control and participatory sense-making. Thereafter, it presents SoundBikes, a music installation that implements these theoretical considerations. SoundBikes is rooted in the idea that collective music-making is a form of participatory sense-making that emerges from embodied, dynamical and collaborative interactions between co-performers. The core components of SoundBikes include an EMS Synthi 100 and two stationary bikes equipped with sensors. To stimulate social interaction and collaboration between cyclist-performers, we designed SoundBikes in a way that performers could exert control over expressive features in the playback of music compositions, by coordinating their (cycling) movements with one another. This functionality is integrated in a gameplay-to further stimulate social 2 Maes et al. Embodied, Participatory Sense-Making in Digitally-Augmented Music Practices collaboration and competition-and a visually attractive environment-to provide visual feedback and to create ambiance.

A Space for Collaborative Creativity. How Collective Improvising Shapes ‘a Sense of Belonging’

“…Applied to joint music making, the social encounter and the freedom of improvisation leads to the creation of meaning through the interaction process. Free improvisation is an emergent feature of social encounters mediated through the bodily interactions with instruments (see Leman, 2016;Nijs, 2017;Bishop, 2018;Maes et al, 2018).…”

“…Collective free improvisation as a pre-eminent example of collaborative creativity can potentially bring people together, engender a powerful interaction process and the forming of social skills. The musical and social interaction during free improvisation often shows emergent features e.g., expressivity, empathetic attunement to others and group flow ( Monson, 1996 ; Sawyer, 2006 ; Maes et al, 2018 ). Kenny (2014) coins this as an example “of how musical groups can build, acquire, share and situate creativity through collaborative processes” (p. 6).…”

Framing Visual Musicology through Methodology Transfer

“…For instance, use case (b) describes a scenario that has not been applied yet and may serve as a starting point to apply body movement based on skeleton analysis models to the movement and gestures of musicians during performances. Of course, factors like cultural context and biological aspects are relevant for understanding the dynamics of music interaction such as in higher-level music training [4,11], interactive multimedia art [32,59], sports [31], and medical rehabilitation [40].…”

“…Thus, musicologists are not able to realize the full potential of their datasets without corresponding computational approaches and strong interdisciplinary collaboration. For instance, there are experimental musicological scenarios such as embodied music cognition [26] or embodied music interaction [32] in which domain experts need to deal with complex body movement data. Adapting available visualization techniques could reveal previously unknown patterns and enable the knowledge generation for the musicology domain.…”

Beyond documentation – The digital philology of interaction heritage

“…(c) The third stage is situated right now(2013)(2014)(2015)(2016)(2017). The synthesiser has been restored and re-contextualised as part of an interactive music game, called SoundBikes(Maes et al, 2018), created for the opening event of the Krook, Ghent, March 2017. The music is electronic dance music, created by the Dewaele Brothers (2ManyDJs).…”